Telling your kids that Osama bin Laden is dead …

First of all, this isn’t a post about how to tell your kids that Osama bin Laden is dead. My credentials are pretty shaky there. Ever since I admitted to leaving my baby with a gas station attendant, I gave up my right to be the authoritative parenting advice guy.

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It’s hard to escape the news.

But for those who have children who are too young to follow the news on their own or discuss political current events in school, I’d like to hear your approach. Do you get proactive and have an Osama bin Laden is dead discussion? Do you undergo a news blackout in your house? Or do you sit back and wait to see if they ask?

My older son is in kindergarten, so he’s right at that age where explaining a targeted assassination of a terrorist is still a bit tricky. And this doesn’t seem like the type of thing that can be explained with a “Toy Story 3” or “Star Wars” analogy. (Although there is a pretty good one.)

I’ve already explained the existence of the Sept. 11 attacks to him, although I’m pretty sure he’s since forgotten. We were talking about firefighters and police about a year ago, and why he should listen to/respect them. I pointed out that police and firefighters put themselves in danger for people, and even die for people, and explained the basics of the World Trade Center attacks. (I got a little choked up, too. Which is why I never play “The Rising” when my kids are around.) At the time I thought I might be making a huge mistake — would my son be afraid to walk in structures with more than three stories? — but he seemed to understand the message. One thing I can say with authority: Kids are more resilient than we think.

I’m guessing a lot of people learned about the assassinations of presidents, Cuban missile crisis, etc. by sitting in front of the television. My earliest memory of this kind of talk with my parents was the Peoples Temple suicides and assassination of Leo Ryan in 1978, when I was seven years old. I remember my aunt and grandmother were there, it was a day or three after the events, and I was treated somewhat like an adult. We gathered around and watched some of the TV coverage (I don’t remember rows of bodies, although there were photos from the airport tarmac in Guyana) and discussed it as a group. I was curious, but not the least bit freaked out. It seems as if the parents handled it OK.

Still, there is an end-of-the-innocence element to the Osama bin Laden story that I’m not looking forward to explaining. My son still gets really excited about chicken nugget day at the school cafeteria. I don’t enjoy dropping the news that there are madmen in the world who want to kill as many Americans as possible, and that our country’s policy is to hunt them down and kill them to protect our safety.

My strategy is to go on with our lives as normal, don’t take any extraordinary steps to censor the news, and answer any questions he has truthfully — with as few gory details as necessary to tell the complete story.

Are you explaining the killing of Osama bin Laden’s to your kids? What was your earliest memory as a child of learning about “serious” news?

PETER HARTLAUB is the pop culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and founder of this parenting blog, which admittedly sometimes has nothing to do with parenting. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/peterhartlaub. Your questions answered on VYou at www.vyou.com/peterhartlaub.